The Patrician eBook

life, by reason of their appearance, position, assurance,
and of a certain energy, half genuine, and half mere
inherent predilection for short cuts. Certainly
he was not idle, had written a book, travelled, was
a Captain of Yeomanry, a Justice of the Peace, a good
cricketer, and a constant and glib speaker.
It would have been unfair to call his enthusiasm for
social reform spurious. It was real enough in
its way, and did certainly testify that he was not
altogether lacking either in imagination or good-heartedness.
But it was over and overlaid with the public-school
habit—­that peculiar, extraordinarily English
habit, so powerful and beguiling that it becomes a
second nature stronger than the first—­of
relating everything in the Universe to the standards
and prejudices of a single class. Since practically
all his intimate associates were immersed in it, he
was naturally not in the least conscious of this habit;
indeed there was nothing he deprecated so much in
politics as the narrow and prejudiced outlook, such
as he had observed in the Nonconformist, or labour
politician. He would never have admitted for
a moment that certain doors had been banged-to at his
birth, bolted when he went to Eton, and padlocked
at Cambridge. No one would have denied that
there was much that was valuable in his standards—­a
high level of honesty, candour, sportsmanship, personal
cleanliness, and self-reliance, together with a dislike
of such cruelty as had been officially (so to speak)
recognized as cruelty, and a sense of public service
to a State run by and for the public schools; but it
would have required far more originality than he possessed
ever to look at Life from any other point of view
than that from which he had been born and bred to
watch Her. To fully understand harbinger, one
must, and with unprejudiced eyes and brain, have attended
one of those great cricket matches in which he had
figured conspicuously as a boy, and looking down from
some high impartial spot have watched the ground at
lunch time covered from rope to rope and stand to
stand with a marvellous swarm, all walking in precisely
the same manner, with precisely the same expression
on their faces, under precisely the same hats—­a
swarm enshrining the greatest identity of, creed and
habit ever known since the world began. No, his
environment had not been favourable to originality.
Moreover he was naturally rapid rather than deep,
and life hardly ever left him alone or left him silent.
Brought into contact day and night with people to
whom politics were more or less a game; run after everywhere;
subjected to no form of discipline—­it was
a wonder that he was as serious as he was. Nor
had he ever been in love, until, last year, during
her first season, Barbara had, as he might have expressed
it—­in the case of another ’bowled
him middle stump. Though so deeply smitten, he
had not yet asked her to marry him—­had
not, as it were, had time, nor perhaps quite the courage,
or conviction. When he was near her, it seemed
impossible that he could go on longer without knowing
his fate; when he was away from her it was almost
a relief, because there were so many things to be
done and said, and so little time to do or say them
in. But now, during this fortnight, which, for
her sake, he had devoted to Miltoun’s cause,
his feeling had advanced beyond the point of comfort.